154 TELEGONY 



evoke, for instance, the alleged quagga mane and quagga stripes 

 in the second foal of Lord Morton's mare. 



Baron compares this supposed influence to the influence of 

 pollen upon fruit (see 10), and Darwin says that this analogy 

 " strongly supports the belief that the male element acts directly 

 on the reproductive organs of the female " (Darwin, 1868, 

 p. 405). But no specific effect on the female animal has ever 

 been demonstrated. 



(d) Perhaps the most plausible theory is that the mother is 

 influenced through the foetus during pregnancy, and that the 

 influence re-acts on subsequent offspring. On this so-called 

 " saturation hypothesis " the suggestion is that the characters 

 of the sire, while expressing themselves in the unborn embryo, 

 also saturate into the dam and affect her constitution in such 

 a precise way that her offspring by subsequent sires may through 

 maternal influence acquire (or inherit ?) some of the character- 

 istics of the first. Thus Sir William Turner (1889), in dis- 

 cussing Lord Morton's case, says, " I believe that the mother 

 had acquired, during her prolonged gestation with the hybrid, 

 the power of transmitting quagga-like characters from it, owing 

 to the interchange of material which had taken place between 

 them in connection with the nutrition of the young one. . . . 

 In this way the germ-plasm of the mother, belonging to ova 

 which had not yet matured, had become modified whilst still 

 lodged in the ovary. This acquired modification had influenced 

 her future offspring, derived from that germ-plasm, so that they 

 in turn, though in a more diluted form, exhibited zebra-like 

 markings." 



Similarly, Cornevin (1891) asks, may not the foetus have in 

 its blood special properties derived from the father, and may 

 not these act like a vaccine on the blood of the mother ? The 

 blood of the mother, thus affected, will act on the ova subsequently 

 fertilised by another sire (Cornevin, 1891, p. 359). So also 

 Harvey, 1851. A similar hypothesis has been suggested to explain 



